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own productions and increasingly hiring out its studio facilities elsewhere. Donald Crisp, brought over by Famous Players-Lasky, made one independent production under his own banner,
Tell Your Children
, based on Islington and with Hitchcock still designing the titles. And among the other productions in the works at Islington was the modest two-reeler variously called
Mrs. Peabody
and
Number Thirteen
, written by Anita Ross, and directed by Alfred Hitchcock.
    It seems to have been a comedy; it featured the American star Clare Greet, and the English stage actor Ernest Thesiger, later known to film audiences as the creator of humunculi in
Bride of Frankenstein
and one of the grotesque inhabitants of
The Old Dark House
, as well as, more generally, an acidulous and witty gossip and an expert at needlepoint in the days when embroidery was not at all a usual occupation for a male. Why was the young title-designer recruited to direct it? Obviously because there was something about this chubby, poker-faced young man, even then, that inspired confidence in others. Also, it must be remembered, it did not really need that much confidence to be placed in him. It was only a short, and moreover, though film direction was just becoming the prerogative of the specialist in Hollywood, the days were not so far behind when just about anyone could and did try his (or her) hand at directing films. Most of the early stars had directed their own movies from time to time, and it seemed just as likely that this young man could do it as that anyone else around the place could. In any case, even modest as it was, the film was never finished and seems not to exist today (thank heavens, says Hitchcock); it had the misfortune to be in production at just the time Famous Players-Lasky was winding up operations, and the studio was left deserted but for a skeleton staff, including Hitchcock.
    During the interregnum which followed, he was given anothervery limited chance to direct. One of the independent productions at Islington early in 1923 was
Always Tell Your Wife
, a one-reel comedy starring the distinguished stage actor Seymour Hicks and his wife Ellaline Terriss. It was, it seems, a pet vehicle of Hicks, who had already filmed it once before. The director of this film, Hugh Croise, had fallen ill, or, according to another account, had not seen eye-to-eye with Hicks about how it should be handled. Either way, it had to be finished without him, and Hicks, at this time in his early fifties and at the height of his theatrical fame, recruited Hitchcock to help him do it. Since the young man, unlike most of the people around the studio at the time, was an enthusiastic theatregoer, he had enough knowledge of Hicks’s background and experience to make himself specially helpful and sympathetic; Hicks himself, on the other hand, belonged to the generation of actor-managers who were Hitchcock’s first idols in show business, being almost exactly of an age with another theatrical knight, Gerald du Maurier, who was to become Hitchcock’s closest friend in the theatre and his friendly competitor in many famous practical jokes.
    Despite these very modest and rather inconclusive first essays in film direction, Hitchcock must have wondered towards the end of 1922 whether he had made an altogether wise move, leaving a pretty safe, solid job with prospects at Henleys for the ever-uncertain world of film-making. Famous Players-Lasky, after all the bright promises, had ceased production and withdrawn to Hollywood. Nothing much seemed to be happening in British film-making, where all the talk was of crisis: it had been at a ‘crisis’ meeting the previous year in the Connaught Rooms that William Friese-Greene, principal British claimant to the invention of cinematography, died, and everything pointed towards the complete cessation of film-making activities in Britain which was to constitute, in November 1924, the third major crisis of the British cinema.